Slim VS editable-website

I spent a few days of my spare time building a VS Code extension that would bring better syntax highlighting for the Slim template language to the editor. I quite enjoyed most of the process so I’d like to share what I learned.

I think they mean Server Side Rendering (normal rails controllers/views), and Slim is just the name of the templating engine. It's a little nicer than the default ERB. https://github.com/slim-template/slim

There's also SSR with react and other js frameworks, but I don't think that's what they meant.

I use something very similar on https://lunar.fyi and https://lowtechguys.com but I wouldn’t call this “simple” anymore.

They use Jinja templating, I prefer Slim (https://github.com/slim-template/slim#syntax-example) which has a more Pythonic syntax (there is plim [0] in Python for that)

I use Tailwind as well for terse styling and fast experimentation (allows me to write a darkMode-aware and responsive 100 line CSS in a single line with about 10 classes)

For interaction I can write CoffeeScript directly in the page [1] and have it compiled by plim.

I run a Caddy static server [2] and use Syncthing [3] to have every file save deployed instantly to my Hetzner server.

I use entr [4] and livereloadx [5] to rebuild the pages and do hot reload on file save. All the commands are managed in a simple Makefile [6]

———

You can already see how the footnotes take up a large chunk of this comment, this is not my idea of simple. Sure, the end result is readable static HTML and I never have to fight obscure React errors, but it’s a high effort setup for starters.

Simple for me would be: write markdown files for pages, a simple CSS for general styling (should be optional), click to deploy on my domain. Images should automatically be resized to multiple sizes and optimized, videos re-encoded for smaller filesize etc.

I have mostly implemented that for myself (https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/How%20I%20write%20this%20blog...) but it feels fragile. I’d rather pay for a professional solution.

[0] https://plim.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[1] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/src/rcmd...

[2] https://caddyserver.com/docs/command-line#caddy-file-server

[3] https://syncthing.net

[4] https://github.com/eradman/entr

[5] https://nitoyon.github.io/livereloadx/

[6] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/Makefile

Checkout slim https://github.com/slim-template/slim it's a templating language

And this is what the HTML looks like (I'm using slim):

The template renders the tag and inside it the link and the counter itself (the Slim template language and Tailwind styling are used here, hopefully the notation is sufficiently self-explaining):

In this part of the series, let's explore another popular templating language, Slim.

Templating languages are widely used in Web development and two of the most popular ones are Pug and Slim. In this series, we're going to learn the basics of these two and hopefully they would help improve your workflow further.

You may want to checkout slim I'v tried ERB, SLIM, and HAML and absolutely sware by slim it's very easy to use and saves a ton of typing compared to ERB.

Been dedicating a ton of time to this goal lately.

I released a "SvelteKit template for building CMS-free editable websites" earlier this year and the idea has evolved since. I started out with using Postgres + MinIO for storage, but have switched entirely to SQLite. I also added an in-place image cropper, to resize and optimize images on the client side (WebP output) before uploading and storing them in SQLite. I chose Svelte because it's easy to build classic Web pages (with minimal JS overhead), and at same time implement the reactive layer (e.g. editing) on top of it (will be loaded async). However we are also evaluating the possibility to port this to a LAMP stack at some point. Oh and everything is dynamic here, no build steps involved, edits are live immediately.

Just launched my first client project using this approach:

https://trails-shop.at?editable=true (hit the red button in the bottom-right corner)

Project website: https://editable.website

The editor payload now is loaded on demand (after you click edit), so it's truly progressively enhanced now. :)

Thank you Nils Kjellman for the patch. https://github.com/michael/editable-website/pull/8